


Just A Little Crush

by StarlingGirl



Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Fluff and Angst, Injury, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-29
Updated: 2016-12-29
Packaged: 2018-09-13 05:18:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9108157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarlingGirl/pseuds/StarlingGirl
Summary: 'James is well aware of Q's little crush. He’s sure he’ll get bored of it, sooner or later, but he never does.He wonders if the constancy is the thing. There’s something distasteful about having to watch attraction fade to plain old lust, lust fade to faint longing. Worst of all when the longing fades to pity or misplaced empathy, compassion he doesn’t need for a life they don’t understand.And it’s easy, to list the times he’s seen that look on Q’s face.'





	

**Author's Note:**

> Another one I found lying around. Yes, the title is from that one song. No, I couldn't think of anything better. Yes, I'm now singing it gently to myself and am unable to stop.
> 
> For Carlota. I hate you.

James is well aware of Q’s little crush.

After all, it’s part of his job to notice people’s attraction – to use it and manipulate it and, if necessary, to create it. He’s used to looking for the flush of skin, the mirroring of body language, eyes that skitter away from too direct a gaze for fear of what might be inadvertently revealed. What’s more, he’s used to _finding_ it, too.

It doesn’t interest him all that much, any more. It’s just a tool – each hint of attraction or blush of arousal catalogued as ammunition, instinctively now, part of his nature.

With Q, it’s somehow fascinating.

James likes to watch the faint stain of colour blossom high on the younger man’s cheeks, doubly so when he himself has provoked it. He likes to see the look in Q’s eyes when he’s resigning himself to giving in to him, even when he knows he shouldn’t. Likes the shift of surprised breath whenever Q finds him already in his house, sprawled on the sofa, or hovering over the oven, or his fingers tucking affection behind the ears of one or other of the cats.

He’s sure he’ll get bored of it, sooner or later, but he never does. He continues to prod and poke and tease, to bask in the reactions he manages to draw, whether conscious or not.

He wonders if the constancy is the thing. There’s something distasteful about having to watch attraction fade to plain old lust, lust fade to faint longing. Worst of all when the longing fades to pity or misplaced empathy, compassion he doesn’t need for a life they don’t understand.

Q, though, stays trapped in that first bloom. Try as he might to conceal it – and he does try, James knows – he never quite manages to escape the magnetism. He’s trapped there, and James can’t help how much he adores the fact.

And it’s easy, to list the times he’s seen that look on Q’s face.

It had been (one) there when they’d first met, sat in front of that ornate frame and the soft brushstrokes of a masterpiece. He’d been weary and unshaven, older than his years after his holiday as a dead man. Sarcastic and surly and not even trying to charm, and _yet._ Q had smiled, against his better judgement, and stolen glances at James from the thick frames of his glasses.

He’d half-wondered, as he stepped out of the grand doors of the gallery and into the dull grey drizzle of a London afternoon, if it had been contrived. After all, the obvious attraction had put him at his ease – safe, and familiar – just when he’d been trying so hard to settle back into himself. He’d walked out with a hint of assurance to his step that had perhaps been a little lacking on the way in, and that certainly played to Six’s advantage. They have his files, they conduct his psych evaluations, and maybe the understand him well enough to know when a pretty face making eyes is enough for him. When it’s just what he needs.

     (He certainly wouldn’t put it past M.)

But it’s (two) still there when he says ‘make me disappear’; it’s oh-so-gratifying to see Q’s eyes widen ever so slightly at his proximity, tongue darting out to wet nervous lips. Perhaps you can fake attraction, but you can’t fake the visceral, physiological response that goes with it. And Q knows he shouldn’t help James – knows he shouldn’t even consider it – but he does. James finds a brutal sort of satisfaction in imagining how quickly he’d refuse another of the double-ohs.

On the surface of things, it’s become a game. It’s fun to make Q blush, to see how much the younger man’s _crush_ will let the older get away with. He enjoys it. Even goes so far as to look forward to it.

And Q – who, even when he’s nervous, never loses his biting wit, and even when he’s going out of the way to help James do something _stupid_ doesn’t take his bullshit lightly – seems just the tiniest bit proud and delighted to have prompted that enjoyment, and never more so than when laughter spills from James’ lips.

The moment it stops being a game is (three) the moment he sees Q’s face light up when he appears back in the tunnels under Whitehall for the first time since he left a childhood memory not-dead on a bridge.

Because it’s the first time that James is forced to admit that this is something more than just a lingering attraction. Q is so happy to see him – almost awed that he’d come back, _to him_. Or so he must have thought.

James experiences an unfamiliar sort of tug at his stomach which he belatedly identifies as guilt, as realisation spreads across Q’s features, and settles itself into resignation. The delighted disbelief that he’d worn only seconds ago is dampened down, folded neatly away where it can’t be seen.

But James needs the car. He’s got a job to do, even if no one else knows it. Madeleine Swan wants to escape this life, and Six have agreed to settle her in a new country, with a new identity. The fewer people that know, the safer she’ll be, and so James ‘runs away’ with her. He’s the one to settle her into his new life, because what better cover for her disappearance could there be? It’s not exactly unusual for James Bond to abscond with a woman and return weeks later, alone. No one will bother to ask. Same old story.

He thinks about telling Q, then, to wipe the melancholy from the set of his jaw and the tilt of his lips, but he doesn’t. There's a hierarchy here, and MI6 is at the top of it. Duty first.

The look on Q’s face when he comes to pick up the car is nothing to the look on his face when (four) he comes back with it, unannounced. It’s joy and it’s relief and it’s something else that he can’t quite identify and it is, for want of a better word, beautiful.

He watches Q circle the Aston Martin, safe in the knowledge that there’s not a scratch on the thing – not a dent or a scuff or a mark.

       (He’d made sure, before he arrived.)

But Q studies it with a fierce intensity, and James does him the courtesy of pretending not to notice the half-formed tears gathering in the blue-green eyes, and tries to work out what to do with a crush that’s gone too far.

It’s always the same look, he’s realised, though it’s a little less guarded outside of work. There's no change to it, no fading, no hint of boredom. And so, even after all this - even after his supposed disappearance and subsequent, unannounced return, he still turns up often at Q’s flat, as if he’s always been there, food for the resident cats and wine for the resident genius and a smirk hooked on the edges of his teeth.

Q’s exasperated by the habit, that much is clear, but he’s also a little bit glad. James reads people like Q reads code and Q’s face has his selfish satisfaction written all over it. Of anyone James could visit, he chooses Q, and that’s something to be held onto when James is sweet-talking a woman into bed, or god-knows-where in the middle of the night. Outside of MI6, away from overly observant co-workers and high-stress situations, there’s something altogether more expressive about Q’s attraction and perhaps – though he’d never admit it – that’s why James keeps coming back.

If James had to list the things that make up who he is, his job would be foremost on the list, probably followed by his rugged good looks and charm; all the things which he presumes lead Q to look at him the way he does.

So here – with the cold, clinical scent of a hospital saturating his nostrils, the rattle and beep of machines saturating the air, the padded restraints that aren’t quite soft enough to keep from biting into his skin when he struggles against them in fits and starts of anger, the last thing he expects to see is (five) that look on Q’s face again. The anaesthetic still has him hazy, but he’s sure that when he sees it, it’s not a dream.

He’s seen an x-ray of his leg. His femur is just a collection of so much shrapnel, his knee a mess that he’ll be lucky to ever use again. One lung is crumpled, crushed by the fractured cage of his own sheared ribs, and really, it would have been a mercy if he’d been half a foot to the left, and the steel beam had crushed his head and spine and killed him, just like that.

He’s restrained for his own safety, or so they’ve told him. The doctor with the broken nose and fractured cheekbone might argue that it’s for everyone else’s. The same doctor who’d told him that no matter how well his recovery might go, he’d never be back in the field.

And when he’d woken again, bleary from the sedative and aching from surgery and wincing from the sharp pain of shattered bone pinned together in too many places, Q had been (six) sat by his bedside, bright eyes fixed on his face, and not a damn thing had changed about the way he looked at James.

Somehow, that makes it worse; it would be easier to lose everything at once, he thinks, than in stages. Today, or tomorrow, or next year: one day Q will realise that the James Bond he’s looking at with pity and empathy is not the same James Bond he once looked at with want and desire and perhaps a quiet edge of awe.

Tomorrow comes, and the day after. Then a week, then a month – six months measured by the ebb and flow of pain and the infrequent visits from Mallory and the regular-as-clockwork visits from Q. Through all of it, he watches the lines of Q’s face and searches almost desperately for the fading of what was once his favourite sight.

The cane is worse than embarrassing. It’s humiliating – only marginally less so than the wheelchair and the physical therapy, than the doctors who’d held him up because he couldn’t even take two steps without help, any more.

He’s slow, and his feet are still clumsy. He’s a liability, and now he knows that there’s no way for him to ever go back to his job. It is, as it turns out, his worst fucking nightmare.

And then there’s Q, patient as a saint, so patient that it only makes James angrier, because in the face of the utter destruction of James Bond, 007, British government’s deadliest agent, the younger man merely smiles a little, fixes James with that same look that he always has. The look that James can’t hope to live up to. Not any more.

Still, it’s months before he breaks. An awkward step sends him stumbling, there but for the grace of Q’s long fingers at his elbow, steadying him, and (seven) smiling a reassuring little smile up at him.

He doesn’t realise he’s shouting until the violent clatter of his cane, thrown away from himself, breaks through his shroud of fury.

    “ – I can’t stand all this fucking _pity!_ ” he’s saying, tongue lashing the words sharp against empty air. “I can’t stand it. Being good for _nothing._ ”

Q looks at him with something that he would probably claim adamantly is Not Pity. When he speaks, it’s as calm as he ever is, as though James hasn’t just erupted into an abrupt rage.

“You are not nothing, James.”

      (If all that was left of you was your smile and your little finger…)

            “You are more than your job, you know.”

                    (…you’d still be more of a man…)

                            “You’ve always been more than that. Always been _better_ than just  
                              a double-oh.”

                                      (…than anyone I’ve ever known.)

A brief silence.

   “And as for the way I look at you --”

Q crosses the room at a measured pace and retrieves the cane, long fingers rolling it to check for dents or scratches and finding none. James’ mouth is dry, and he tries to recall the words his rage had ripped from him, unintentional admissions of half-formed secrets.

      “ – well, you can lose all the limbs you like.” He returns to James side, and holds out the cane. “I don’t expect it will ever change.” He smiles, almost sickly, as though acknowledging for the first time the look he’s been giving James for years, now, has left him with a sour taste in his mouth. James reaches out for the cane, their fingers not-quite brushing together.

 “Q,” James begins, but he’s interrupted by the younger man.

“Thank you, Bond,” Q says, briskly, and his sudden aversion to his Christian name is a blow. “But I won’t stand for pity, either.”

James doesn’t know what to say to that, and so he says nothing at all. He regrets that, later, aching and exhausted from the toll of walking the short distance between the car and his own flat, quiet and empty and dusty with disuse.

He lies in bed, trying not to think about having to move to a ground floor flat, somewhere, closer to the shops and a tube station and paid for on the more-than-generous pension that Her Majesty’s government will provide. And instead, he finds he's thinking about this:

   one, the beginning and  
     two, the abetting and  
       three, the heartbreak and  
         four, the giddy relief and  
          five, the dreamlike and  
            six, the improbable and  
              seven the impossible.

He thinks about that brush of fingers and the defiance in Q’s confession. He is nothing now, a shell of what he once was, and he’s lost. His one anchor – the one shining light in this rough sea – the one thing that beginning to end, hasn’t tarnished or faded or drained away, is the way that Q has looked at him.

It’s nearly midnight when he makes it to Q’s door.

He’d had to call a taxi, to painstakingly make his way down the stairs to the door, only to find that the driver had assumed he wasn’t coming, and buggered off. He’d had to call another, and wait in the chill night air. Gone the days where he could have popped back upstairs for a warmer coat, and gone too the days when he would have simply walked. They don’t live that far apart, but for _this_ James Bond, there might as well be an ocean between them, now, at least where walking is concerned.

The taxi drops him on the street, and it’s a long haul to the other end to reach Q’s building. He has to halfway to sit down on a low, crumbling brick wall. His entire side aches, from his ankle to his neck. The cold burns in his joints.

And then there’s the fact that Q lives six floors up.

He climbs, a step at a time, the hardest thing he’s ever done. For a man who once fought and ran and drove more wildly than most ever dream of, the challenge of it seems immense. Insurmountable.

His pride lasts until the third floor, where he sinks to the ground, an incongruous stranger perched on the concrete step, cane abandoned beside him. He calls Q.

Q’s in his pyjamas. Over-sized t-shirt, brushed cotton trousers, bare feet. He pads down the stairs, no rush. James appreciates the pretence that there’s nothing wrong. That they might be meeting here for convenience, or by pre-arranged design. Q sinks down next to him, takes up the rest of the step.

“I could have come to yours,” he points out. James smiles, tight and exhausted and pained.

“It was important.”

“Hm.” Q’s disbelief is obvious. Still, he settles into quiet, happy to wait.

James counts his breaths and waits until it’s something less than agony for each inhale. And then he looks over at Q, only to find that Q’s is already unabashedly fixed on his face. For half a second, he shies away from what he’s been so determined to say. The idea that he might have lost his reckless bravery along with his mobility is all that saves him.

“I like the way you look at me,” he says, frank and subtle as ever. Q blushes, at that. Opens his mouth, closes it again – looks away. James chuckles, reaches out to brush a thumb against the high colour of Q’s cheek.

“James.” Q’s tone is almost pleading, and James does the only thing he can think to do to explain himself – to show Q that he hasn’t come here just to tease, to poke fun. Rough fingers reach out for their graceful counterparts, and curl around them when they’re found. Q hesitates.

James watches him look from their hands to his face and back again, watches him swallow and hesitantly, cautiously, slide his own fingers in between the older man’s. When he glances back up again, from under dark lashes and behind slightly skew glasses, there's a dozen things hidden in that look and it’s (eight, nine, ten) better than anything he’s ever seen. Q blinks, smiles and (eleven, twelve, thirteen) squeezes the hand in his, just a little.

“Let’s get you upstairs,” is all he says, but he reaches out (fourteen through twenty-five) to adjust the scarf around James’ neck instead of making any attempt to move.

“I need to sit a little while longer,” James says, the admission jarring through gritted teeth. Q doesn’t comment and there’s no pity in the look (twenty-six) he sends James’ way.

“I can wait,” is all he says.

       “I know.” After all, he already has.

James studies the smile tucked in every dip and swell and curve of Q’s face. No point, he supposes, in counting any more. It’s something different, now, just a little. He’s not quite sure what’s changed – after all, the blush is still the same, the parted lips, the unconscious hitch in breath at his proximity, the dilated pupils, the slightly accelerated breathing.

He’ll figure it out.

                Q will wait.


End file.
